After a scorcher of a week, I am so glad the heat is tampering down again, at least until the weekend it seems. I know that we don’t get the high highs and low lows here in California. We’ve got relatively pleasant weather but ugh last week was icky. It was t-shirt and tank top weather. And I had one too many a flashback to life in Singapore, living with heat and humidity and my eczema!

Best dim sum in the SF Bay Area is at Koi Palace or its offshoot Koi Garden. My favourites are the roast pork with jellyfish (centre) and the chestnut cake (not pictured). And the liu sa bao or salted egg yolk custard buns are sinful and so good.Also another favourite of ours is Pakwan, an Indian-Pakistani place that we order takeout from. Tandoori fish, saag dal, garlic naan. Yum. We also had some mutton biriyani and mixed vegetable curry. My four-year-old loves the tandoori chicken and the naan. The two-year-old refused to eat anything but the naan.

Currently…

Reading:

The Italian Girl – Iris Murdoch

Almost forgot about this one

Messenger of Truth (Maisie Dobbs #4) – Jacqueline Winspear

Figured that RIP X is as good a time as any to pick up with Maisie Dobbs again!

Sorcerer to the Crown – Zen Cho

Just got this from the library’s Overdrive catalogue. SO excited!

And later on Sunday, I was notified that more e-book holds were waiting for me!

The Quick – Lauren Owen

Beauty is a wound – Eka Kumiawan (trans)

Watching:

Pitch Perfect. I saw it when it came out, but my Mum hasn’t seen it, so we watched it together on Saturday night. She thought it was fun. And we all had a good laugh.

Eating:

Well nothing at the moment, but we did just come back from breakfast at our usual diner. So we had pancakes, French toast, bacon, eggs, hash browns and corned beef.

Drinking:

Green tea. It’s finally cooler this week! Last week I drank mostly cold barley tea, straight from the fridge. The barley tea comes in sachets and can be cold-brewed. So it’s nice for a change to drink some hot tea!

Cooking:

Ribs – usually I pop them in the slow cooker after marinating for a few hours. Then in the oven to broil with a bit of barbeque sauce.

A boring and predictable (yet enjoyed by everyone) spaghetti bolognese.

River City Reading wonders: how much research do you do before you read a book? For me, very little, unless it is a book I am accepting for review or as part of a blog tour. I kind of like to go by blog posts by bloggers I’m fond of. I generally scan the review, avoiding large chunks of synopsis, looking for quotes from the book, a general idea of whether the blogger liked it or not. I like to go into a book relatively blindly, and I’ve discovered a lot of great new writers this way. Like NK Jemisin, whose Hundred Thousand Kingdoms I read because of Eva’s post some years back!

Oh mine at least wasn’t as bad as my older boy’s when he was a baby! He had such bad eczema ALL OVER – face, arms, legs, waist! It turned out he has food allergies and just very sensitive skin in general. We used to have frequent visits with a dermatologist and allergist (he still sees his allergist once a year). But I have to credit his eczema being gone to bleach baths (it sounds horrible but it’s really just a capful of bleach in a bathtub – kind of like swimming pool water I guess?) and steroids!